Douganator!

The blog lives huzzah

Haha while writing this i got distracted and read an article on behavioral economics, which is basically a school which takes phsycology techniques and aplies it on a mass scale to try and explain the economy. The article states that there are only two groups of people who act rationally economists themselves and phsycopaths. look out people i may be the next phsycopath hehe.

Music i'm listening to

First off i really wanna recommend an album by a new band called "mika" truly stunning stuff, the first single "Grace Kelly" which is getting alot of airplay on the radio atm, captured my attention with the lead singers' awesome falsetto (very queenesque, he even references freddy mercury) and interesting lyrics. Heres the clip for the vid from Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzA0nG_PurQ

However while this fun flirtacious ditty initially captured my ears, i'm really liking the more soulful grooves found on the rest of the album. High energy, fun songs that make you dance around the room, are hard to make, and i'm always happy to stumble upon these gems. However what i find very rare are artists that can produce slow ballads that aren't just plain boring. However mika has hit the nail on the head with "any other world" and "happy ending" nice piano melodies and string backgrounds make for very full sounds that are making me happy at the moment :). Another noteworthy tune for the more thoughtful melodic genre that has been gracing the curcuitry of my Mp3 player has been "arithmetic" by brooke fraser. Its a nice escape from the world to remember that really the only thing thats certain and desirable is Jesus. That while the world is big and vast and confusing, that God can't be nailed down to science or logic, but only to a wierd transcendental spiritual relationship with his creations, nnnoooice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D23sjATRmQw

I've been thinking about sin and satan alot recently. As a bible believing Christian it my duty and joy for me to live God's way and to submit to the bible. However while it is a total blessing to be guided by God, we don't always live up to our own expections and fail to meet God's constantly. I am at times at a lose to explain why I continue to sin, both intentionally and unintentionally. Why i place worldly goals and values above those of Gods and live in a way that conveys that i prioritize materialism, self indulgence, popularity and gluttony above the kingdom of God. Of course this is illogical and irrational. It stems from the phenomenon of what economist have dubbed the "myopic tradition", i.e. we are short sighted. All of us as economic entities have made decisions which have given us a very short benifit such as meaningless purchases which compromise our future useage. People choose to live in the now, rather than doing is what is best for themselves and others in the long run. Global warming, hyper-consumerism, negative savings, huge trade deficits and the majority of environmental problems such as acid rain are the macro results of our species myopic nature.

Now getting back to sin, before i lose half of my readership for ranting on about economics for to long... I was thinking to myself what actually causes me to sin. I wanted to try and nail down, as a thought experiment, I started trying to nail the roots causes of my dichotomous life. Why there is such tension between my foot in the kingdom of God and the world?

Trying to figure sin out through a model

The point and essence of any model is to create a framework with which to better understand the world. To model a problem you can use maths, anecdotes, graphs, charts and whatever other analytical tools at your disposal that tickle your fancy. It The truth is that while most people retract when they hear the word "model" unless its followed closely by words such as "lingerie", "super" or "car" they've been using models their whole life and the bible is chock full of them. Mostly though with biblical models one has to stay within the anecdotal framework because the ideas and concepts dealt with are mainly qualitative rather than quatitative.

The three things which I feel that sin stems from in my life are these:

Myopicism
Apathy
Cynicism

conviently they lead to the handy acronym MAC, perhaps that is an omen which proves once and for all that Pc's are better than macks *cough* you know its true *cough*.

Myopicism
There are real and definate gains to be made in this world by sinning. I've studied a bit of gametheory, and the justifications for cheating share an eerie parrallel to the justification for sin. Short term the gains are there to be made, but at the compromise of your relationship with all other participants in the game with you. In the first round you win, the second, third and so on, you lose, people basically screw you over for screwing them over indefinately. Lifes kinda like that with God, you can cheat, you can screw people over, you can indulge in all the consumerism, debauchery and worldly desires you so choose, but come period two, the guy whose been in charge of the game the whole time has one or two things about your actions in the first round. People still cheat because they are myopic, people still sin because they are myopic, long term you lose.

Its hard to trust the long term to God, sin in the short term delludes you with its sweetness, proverbs says that the words of the adultress taste like honey but go down like gravel. Sin is similar, it delludes you into believing that the gains to be made outweigh the long term costs of compromising a relationship with God. I know this, I say this, yet every day I sin in a myriad of different ways. If it was purely a case of short term gains played off against infinitely greater gains long term i would have rectified the problem, but the nature of sin mean that there is more to it than just making adjustments and continuing on in a more merry way

Apathy
Apathy is the disease and curse which plauges me and i would imagine the majority of the human population. We see things that need doing and have lots of "shoulds" and "coulds" in our mind but relatively few of these ever come to fruition. I find myself regularly loosing momentum. I just simply don't do christian things. There seems no rhyme or reason to it, maybe i'm wrapped up in economics, maybe i'm just tired, who knows but my relationship with God falls by the wayside, the trials and tribulations of life take over and sin begins to creep back in. There seems to be a slow breakdown of the systems that one places in ones life to deal with sin. Things you swore you were over once and for all and old demons seem to rear their head after a while and your back in a dark place you though you had left. I think apathy can stem from feelings, when you feel down and antisocial, church and bible study seem like a chore. I know i've missed both for no reason, reading your bible just convicts you of your own sinfulness and so apathy slowly starts to strangle your faith. The great partner of apathy is cynicism very rarely will you find one without the other

Cynicism
When the minister who eventually convinced me that Christianity was seriously worth a go, left my church he had ten points, i remember that in the top 3 one of them was "cynicism sucks". When your own looking for loopholes and flaws you will find them in the bible, even if they are not there. The classic pygmallion effect of what you believe becomes your reality, though in this case not actual reality. The image of God gets transformed from loving father to a despot who wishes to hold out all the fruits of life and make you miserable. Rather than being joyful that God chose you at all, all you can see is the millions who haven't been chosen and find nothing but anger and at times even hatred for your creator. Sometimes the more poetic language can feel frustrating and economic rationalism, science and one own way of living becomes more appealing. In the end mine and i'm sure most peoples cynicism gets so bad that the motivation to refrain from sin is just killed. I end up prioritizing spending money on going out rather than giving to church, the 3rd and 4th beer seem to go down just a little to easily. In the end whatever identity you convey to others its certainly not Christian. Of course you aren't going to feel like going to church either and those short term tangible gains from sin are starting to look pretty good. Thus this cycle of MAC traps you, one leads to the other leads to the other, until you no longer feel like you are living for Christ or being distinguishable as a believer either. The will to stand out and be an alien to this world diminishes as your citizenship becomes more and more firmly rooted to the world rather than God's kingdom.

I guess the point of all this is that in knowing how and why i spiral, and I assume others spirals also have similar elements, one is better equipped to tackle sin and reverse the trend. Obviously heaps can be written for each one of the three elements i identified, but thats just a short summary of what i've been thinking about recently in relation to sin. I think there is alot to be said to forcing yourself through not feeling like doing things. I haven't felt like going to church or bible study for a while i've probably only attended 50% of what i should have in the last couple of months for various reasons some valid some not. Though the times when I have gone i've actually got alot out of it. I had one of those blessed talks where it fits in exactly with what I'd been thinking about 2 weeks ago. All week my internal voice kept saying "I want forgiveness to seem real" and then we had one of the best talks on forgiveness i've heard in a while. 10 points for God for hooking that one up.

Random side point

The idea of being alien in the world has held rather true this week. My parents think that i feel superior and that i'm arrogant for taking the bibles words as truth over all else and being unwilling to compromise it. We've had some rather heated discussions about judgement recently, its hard to explain and hard to put in a way thats loving and helpful to them. They keep asking me, "do you think such and such is "damned"?" or "such and such should be punished for not doing XYZ even though they did ABC?" its hard, my bible says that the only way to God is through christ and that we need God and Jesus in order to be saved. I really want to tell my parents that the people they talk about will be in heaven and that being good is good enough. They corner me regularly into trying to make me say things in a way that isn't what God is all about, when i'm forced to say 'yes if they haven't fulfilled what God has asked of them in order to be saved then they will not be' they look at me disgustedly. My dad thinks that this is the most arrogant thing anyone can possibly believe and thinks that i'm being stupid and ridiculous for even bothering with Christianity at all. I just pray that maybe one day they might see the truth in it. When they talk to me like that though it makes me want to give up praying for them, I love them, I want them to be in the right place for eternity. At the moment however chrisitanity just seemed to have placed a divide between the kids and parents in our household. They don't get what or why we do the things we do, so they make remarks such as "have you solved the worlds problems yet?", or "are you saved yet?". Its hard to not rise to the subtext as these are clearly intended to belittle mine and my sisters faith, its more often (thankfully) its directed at me, because i can handle it better. Also i think there is an expectation for me to "know better" and to use the logic that they brought me up with to figure problems such as suffering, death, wickedness and injustice out rather than turning to solutions which seem at best unscientific. I spose I'll keep praying about it, though its hard to imagine God would change hearts that already seem so hardened.

YBIC Doug

posted by Douganator @ 9:05 PM